THE STAGE HAS BEEN DARK for
nearly 2,000 years. Yet enough light
shines down through an old well shaft
to show me that this buried Roman
theater had been grand. Surely it once
blazed with spectacles. I close my eyes and
see the elegantly marbled proscenium, the
acrobats, the preening athletes on exhibit,
the bawdy mimes. I hear the lyres, flutes,
and cymbals, and the jingling bracelets of
dancers. I see a famous actor from Rome,
mask in hand and regally clad, waiting to
make his entrance.
I open my eyes, and the steady drip of
groundwater onto the stage reminds me that
I am 30 meters (100 feet) underground. This
theater, once the opulent pride of the ancient
seaside town of Herculaneum, lies beneath a
succession of pyroclastic flows and surges.
These glowing avalanches began roaring
down the slopes of Mount Vesuvius about
midnight of August 25 in A.D. 79, scorching
and smothering the countryside, including
the neighboring city of Pompeii.
My escort, assistant supervisor Vittorio
De Girolamo, takes me down a corridor
leading to the costume depository. He points
his flashlight upward at the hardened volca
nic flow overhead. A haunting face stares
back down. It is only an imprint, made by
the head of a statue that the glowing ava
lanche picked up as it invaded the theater.
Yet this impassive visage testifies that the
last performance on this stage was indeed
a tragedy.
One can argue that this stage was also
where modern archaeology was born. All
traces of Pompeii and Herculaneum had
been lost until 1709, when a well digger acci
dentally struck the stage. Tunnels were dug,
and soon the ruling nobility of Naples began
to loot the theater. They stripped away its
multicolored marble facings for their villas
The audience roars as masked players
in Herculaneum'stheateract out a
comedy. The white-beardedfather
catches a young slave with a bag of ill
gotten money as a bejeweled courtesan
looks on. A pairof bronze cymbals lies on
stage. The theater,seating between
2,500 and 3,000, was discovered and
looted in the 1700s.
PAINTINGBY LOUISS. GLANZMAN
566